Multi-Core Processors :

A seminar

• Presented by:
Rakesh Babu G R
04EC45
Dept of E&C
NITK, Surathkal
 Outline
• What?
• Block diagram
• Why? – Yet another Brick wall
• Changes in Software
• Advantages
• Disadvantages
• Summary
“Moore’s Law was over (doubling of
CPU power every 18 months). Intel
said, in essence, “Sorry, we’re not
going to build you 10GHz
processors - but we will let you
have lots of 3GHz ones” [1]
Welcome to the
world of “multi-core”
processor chips
 What are Multi-core
processors?

• 2 or more Execution cores within one

processor
• Plugs into a single processor socket
• Operating system sees two
processors [3]
Block diagram [3]
“The power wall + the
memory wall + the ILP wall =
a brick wall for serial
performance.”- David
Patterson, “Father of RISC” [5]
"Power is expensive, but
transistors are 'free'. That is, we
can put more transistors on a
chip than we have the power to
turn on.“ => Power wall [5]
Power wall
Power wall [6]
 Power wall
• Cooling technology to offset increase in
power
• But it has limitations
• 2 processors out of the transistors, run at
a lesser frequency
• But 2 processors => More throughput
• Pentium 4 @ 3 GHz
• Pentium D @ 2.67 GHz
"Load and store is slow, but
multiply is fast. Modern
microprocessors can take 200
clocks to access Dynamic
Random Access Memory (DRAM),
but even floating-point multiplies
may take only four clock cycles.“
[5]
 “And increasing the size of the
already great big caches
traditionally used to mask
memory latency aren't giving us
a good return on the transistor
investment anymore.” =>
Memory wall [5]
 Memory wall
• Traditional approach:
• Scale frequency + Increase Cache
• Doesn’t work now
• Increase in cache size doesn’t
increase access time by much
Memory wall [5]
 Memory wall
• There is increase in transistor density at
the rate predicted by Moore
• But, not the Performance!!!!!! since 2002
• Since access time hasn’t improved
• Use excess transistors for 2 cores
• Use a lesser frequency rate at which
access rate is not that bad
 Case study: IBM POWER6
[2]
• By a Sun employee : So, we have take it with a
pinch of salt
• What did IBM do?
• They more than doubled their clock rate
(2.2GHz to 4.7GHz)
• Quadrupled the size of their L2 on-chip
caches (1.92MB on POWER5+, 8MB on
POWER6
And what did they get for their
efforts? [2]
 Memory wall
• POWER6 : Diminishing performance returns
• Why??? It has pinned its hopes on old,
unimaginative, and out of date techniques
that the rest of the industry has largely
abandoned
• “You may ask, how did this tradition get
started? I'll tell you. I don't know.”
"There are diminishing returns on
finding more ILP. ... Increasing
parallelism is the primary method of
improving processor performance“
=> ILP wall [5]
 What is ILP???
• Apart from speed-up by frequency scaling
• “Speed-up by having duplicate hardware
speculatively execute future instructions before
the results of current instructions are known
while providing hardware safeguards to prevent
the errors that might be caused by out of order
execution”, ILP – Instruction Level Parallelism
[4]
 ILP wall
• Increase in hardware Super-linear
• Increase in performance not even
linear
• Can’t even predict the speed-up
because of non-
deterministic(probabilistic) nature
 Advantages [3]
• They scale up the brick wall, i.e. the
power wall + memory wall + ILP wall
• Presence of two processors(execution
cores) on same die increases clock rate
at which certain processes operate
• Occupies less space than many
processors joined in the board
 Disadvantages [3]
• The Operating system has to be modified to
utilize the increased resources
• The thousands of applications that we run have
to be re-written to fully utilize the improved
hardware and the parallelism thus obtained
• The training of software developers to write
better software for dual, quad and other multi-
core processors, €€€€€€€€€€€€€€€€€
 Moral of the story
• Multi-core processors are the way to
increase the performance of the
processor
• OS and software should be re-written
to exploit the parallelism obtained
 An interesting thing
• Greed of corporations
• Some of them count each processor
in a die as one separate processor
• So, if you use a dual core, you will
have to pay twice the licensing
amount
 References
• http://www.verilab.com/blog/2007/06/the-core-
problem-of-computing/ [1]
• http://blogs.sun.com/jmeyer/entry/power6_goes_thud_p
art_iv [2]
• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multi-core_(computing) [ 3]
• http://www.ctwatch.org/quarterly/articles/2007/02/the-
many-core-inflection-point-for-mass-market-computer-
systems/1/ [4]
 References
• http://www.eecs.berkeley.edu/Pubs/Tec
hRpts/2006/EECS-2006-183.html [5]
• “Multi-Core Processor Technology:
Maximizing CPU Performance in a
Power-Constrained World”, Paul Teich,
AMD [6]
 Questions

???